Saturday, 6 November 2010

Attracting people to your website is good. Marketing is an essential part of achieving online success. But if you’re not marketing to the right people, your efforts will be for naught. Here are some tips to help you target your local market with your marketing efforts:

1. Long Tail Keywords

Use long tail keywords in your search engine optimisation campaigns. These phrases refer to local places and niche specialties in many cases and can help you target your local demographic, rather than fight with the much larger competition base trying to rank for short tail keywords. A good example of this is to try to rank for Cheshire pizza parlour, rather than pizza or UK marketing consultancy firm rather than “marketing”. As your competition narrows, your target customer / prospect has more of a chance of finding the thing they seek.

2. Know Your Competition

Understanding who you’re up against in the world of online marketing can help you be more appealing to your target market. If you’re a restaurant, you can try to appeal to your local area and try to appear to your biggest competitor’s clients as well. Understanding what your competition may not do well could help you surpass them.

3. Local Directories

Getting listed in local directories does several things for you. It helps people browsing local directories find you and it helps search engines connect the dots between your geographical area, your business niche, and your target customers. Directory submissions, particularly when targeted by local geographical area and by niche, can help you improve targeted traffic levels and organic SEO.

4. Lead CaptureLocal marketing should be about more than waving at your website visitors when they arrive. Try to capture those leads through permission marketing techniques or via a sales pipeline with autoresponder software, for instance. Not only can you work on turning visitors into real customers but if they’re local, this could help you with local referrals as well. There are many things you can do to slowly increase your market share in your area!

5. Social Marketing

Social marketing is great for local businesses. They can find people to follow based on geographical area, advertise to their customers, use data mining techniques to learn more about their audience, niche, and competition, and use it to build their brand and strengthen their relationships. If you’re not using social marketing tools such as Twitter and Facebook, you could be missing out!

Local marketing techniques can help you grow your business substantially. And if you need help there are consultants who could provide you with a customised strategy.